


The Lesson of the Story

by bad_pheasants



Category: Killjoys (TV)
Genre: Aneela is a proud murder mama, Character Study, Dutch flexes her baby psychic muscles, Family Dynamics, Flashbacks, Gen, Magical Realism, Sort Of, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-17
Updated: 2018-12-17
Packaged: 2019-09-21 00:56:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,584
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17033244
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bad_pheasants/pseuds/bad_pheasants
Summary: The Lady keeps trying to convince Aneela that Dutch isn’t coming back for her. Dutch has something to say about that.





	The Lesson of the Story

**Author's Note:**

  * For [celaenos](https://archiveofourown.org/users/celaenos/gifts).



“Tell me a story, _Mama_?” Yala says, in her sweet voice, sitting on her lap. 

_Here_. She’s here, with Yala, the mirrored white of their cube both a prison, and the only place she ever truly felt happy after becoming Hullen. “Of course, Little One. What story do you want to hear?” 

“Tell me again,” Yala’s small voice says, “About how you gave me to Khlyen to hide me from the Lady?”

Aneela’s throat closes. Her whole body reacts, muscles closing up, like she could physically keep the story from leaving her. 

_Here_. She’s here, of course. Where they Lady has taken all her best memories and turned them into nightmares. Of course this was coming. 

“Mama,” Yala’s voice is suddenly certain and _different_ , and Aneela knows it’s Her. “It’s my _favorite_.”

Aneela fights it. There’s no point in fighting. But she fights it anyways. 

“Tell me the story.” Yala’s voice no longer sounds like Yala. A rumble beneath the tones of it, like an avalanche, a tsunami of all the voices the Lady has ever stolen.

So many voices.

Aneela cannot win at this. The Lady already knows Yala’s story. The Lady has lived it an infinite number of times, since it came into her possession.

But it is not simply the memory that the Lady wants.

_When the nights were long and the days were deep, there lived a girl..._ Aneela can hear _Papa_ ’s voice in her mind. The beginning of the tale.

“ _Tell me_.” The Lady’s voice snatches the fire between her synapses, maps out light and dark. There is no story, only the unfolding of everything folded into her skull. A map of the universe. _Her_ universe. 

Yala’s life is unfolded from the corner where she keeps it. 

Aneela closes her jaw with imaginary wires. She does not give the Lady what She wants. 

No matter how many times She shows Aneela how she failed.  

//

The Lady ignores the body save as a vessel for the will. She moves up—always up, and into the brain. Into the mind. 

_Memories are what make you who you are._

She means neurons; electrochemical pathways, a pattern of synapses fired in sequence, experiences stored in gray matter. 

Aneela has been experimented on via her neurons her whole Hullen life. Loaded with so many memories, so many strains of Green, that her mind does not know what is hers, and what isn’t. Until it ceases to matter entirely. 

But neurons are not the only place that memory lives. 

Nothing has left an outward mark on her since she became Hullen; nor inward. 

Seemingly. 

And the Lady has learned how to break the bond of emotion between what happened in her previous life and this life—

Also seemingly. 

But the Lady cannot change what happened in her life that shaped her before then. The scar on her thumb where she sliced it open when she was eight. The softness of her hands, the lack of calluses, is a memory of its own. Is a trail for her to follow back from her shattered self. From foot to head, she’s laid trails for herself to follow—made landmarks of her scars, markers of her past life; in other places, glyphs, the Scarback “glyphs of the Dead”. 

In others, something far more complex. 

_What is the lesson of the story, Neelie?_ Papa would ask. There was always a point to his stories, a key detail, something it boiled down to. A shade to the left or the right, and the lesson is not the same. Like a butterfly’s wings, the story would warp and change, rippling out and out and out. 

It was his gift; his surgical precision. How they were able to hide Yala from the Lady at all. 

But after a thousand repetitions, the fitting of her mouth around the words, Aneela knows something else—A memory is not a story. A story is not a memory. 

_The story is the most important part of the story._ The story has a mouth. Has eyes, and hands, and hair. It walks and it wears its scars and even a copy of itself, a retelling, is never truly, completely alike. 

The body is a story. Her skin is filled with them, graves of being, memories like ghosts in her mouth. Her muscles climb the stair of it, one word at a time. 

_The story is the most important part of the story._

//

“She’s not coming for you.” The Lady says in her _Papa_ ’s bored tone, an imitation that could only come from someone who has eternity to practice. 

“Maybe not.” 

But a humming rises in her throat; an echo. A rasp like tears, like running til her windpipe is raw: _I want you to know: Wherever he’s taken you, whatever he’s done to you—_

Something cracks open slightly in her chest. 

“She hates you.” _Papa_ ’s face is suddenly close to hers, smirking. “You’ve given her every reason to.” 

“Yes.” Aneela says, and the doubt is there, is cold and terrible as the ice coating Arkyn’s surface. She cannot stop it. She remembers Yala’s rage, has worn it on the inside of hear skin. But underneath—

_—I will find you._

Aneela isn’t D’avin. She’s not… family. She certainly isn’t loved. She’s a shadow, maybe, a spectre. A figure of fear, but also hope; the reason for all Yala's losses, all her trauma, but the thing she’s pulled towards nonetheless. 

Aneela _wanted_ to make a safe place for her. 

Aneela can’t protect Yala, either. She has always been transparent to the Lady, who wears all forms, who lives between synapses. This is why Yala was removed from her memories. 

There are no secrets between them. 

Yala’s life in time and memory is unspooled and laid out like cards in a game. The Lady can see it, can manipulate it. But she does not understand the story of it. She does not know the meaning of it. She can watch Aneela pull Yala from the Green, but She can’t fathom how to do it Herself. How the thing is greater than the sum of its parts. 

Neither does she, Aneela supposes. But she does it anyway. 

She feels it, burning in her palm, even though she hasn’t moved under the Lady’s watchful eye, the secret she carved into her skin, each step on the path she treads between these two worlds, rungs on a twisting ladder that she retraces every time: 

_Elixir. Dissolve. Ascend._

“Why shouldn’t she leave me to burn?” Aneela answers. “After everything I’ve taken from her. Everything Khlyen has taken from her.” 

The Lady paces, smirking. 

A cracking in her heart, she feels it again—not the weight of her own failure, but the ache of empathy, the way Yala stands under the weight of her own actions, in the face of the incomprehensible, watching the way that guilt bows D’av’s shoulders. 

_“The first time I ever killed someone, I was eight years old.”_

_“How?”_

_“Poisoned tea.”_

All her life, no one has protected Yala. She’s been a weapon, passed from hand to hand. 

And Aneela is no protector—she’s never even been able to protect herself—but that can’t matter now. 

The Lady grows irate; grows afraid, and more brazen and cruel, and then more afraid, because she does not understand, how Aneela could weave a secret into her very being, when she has no flesh herself, here in this place that is entirely of the mind. 

She doesn’t understand—how Aneela knows, even before she knows her own name, the fierceness living and beating in someone else’s heart. How that could inextricably pull her into to the white of the walls, draw her mind along mirrored edges—how she could watch her hands pull a memory made flesh from the Green, and _know_ —in her hands, in her bones—how to retrace her own steps. How a memory could constellate, and solidify, and come alive. 

_Elixir. Dissolve. Ascend._

And the Lady cannot root out the memories, cannot seize them, because she does not understand what memory is. What _being_ is, this flickering in and out, constellation and dissolution, close and open. This thing She is so desperate to get for Herself. 

Even though Aneela has drunk from Her cup, allowed Her under her skin. 

_Drink. Dissolve. Ascend._

Like a trail of stars along her nerves, there’s a voice, humming in her throat, taste of burnt synthetics and copper, small and bright and defiant into the void: 

_I want you to know: We’re never giving up._

“You can’t protect her. I can see everything you can.” The Lady tilts Her head as if perplexed that Aneela still resists. “We both know how this will end. She won’t come for you. You will give me the way out. You will give me _her_. Why make yourself suffer?” 

(This is Aneela’s favorite part:)

_Wherever She’s taken you, whatever She’s done to you—_

Callused fingertips on her chin. “You are _valuable_ to me, Aneela. You’re special. There’s no one else like you; so brave, so unique, so powerful. I hate to see you throw your life and your talent away for someone who cares nothing for you. Who will crumble to dust no matter what you do.” 

_—I will find you._

“She’s not coming back for you.” 

Aneela closes her eyes, poised between perfect despair and a voice that ears can’t hear, that _She_ can’t hear, and therefore can’t take from Aneela: 

_I will find you._


End file.
